BRIDGE OF SPIES (Steven Spielberg) 142 minutes. Opens Friday (October 16). See listings. Rating: NNNN
Someone will inevitably call Bridge Of Spies “old-fashioned,” but don’t buy it. The values are vintage, sure, but the storytelling is state of the art.
This is Steven Spielberg’s second consecutive movie about idealism and negotiation. Three years ago, in Lincoln, he made gripping drama out of the president’s attempts to wrestle Congress into abolishing slavery. Now he’s turned a sliver of Cold War history into a meditation on morality and American values.
In 1957, a British national named Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) was arrested in New York and charged with spying for the Soviet Union. His lawyer was James B. Donovan (Tom Hanks), who got him a 30-year sentence rather than the electric chair, arguing that showing mercy to Abel would keep the Soviets from executing any American spy who might fall into their hands.
And in 1962, when Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell) was shot down over the USSR, Donovan was sent to East Berlin – as a civilian, with minimal support from the CIA – to negotiate his exchange for Abel.
The script, written by Matt Charman and rewritten by Joel and Ethan Coen, turns Donovan’s story into an almost purely intellectual thriller. Most of the conversations are subtextual there’s tension, but the main characters are almost never in any real danger.
As in Lincoln, the movie is a series of scenes in which potential adversaries take each other’s measure to see what might happen next. And also as in Lincoln, this is a movie about human beings rather than icons. Hanks isn’t playing a hero he’s playing a functionary. Rylance’s Abel isn’t a villain he’s an artist who occasionally reads secret messages. And so on down the line, with the exception of an East German power broker (Sebastian Koch) who’s just a dick.
It’s the characters’ humanity that makes us care, of course, and makes Bridge Of Spies as taut – and as unexpectedly funny – as it is. (I suspect the Coen brothers helped find those details and coax them out.)
It’s a film in which virtually nothing happens and the ending is a foregone conclusion, and you’re still on the edge of your seat.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
